During the Spanish Civil War, James Robertson Justice is alleged to
have halted a charge on the battlefield, while serving with the
International Brigade against Franco’s fascists, by pointing at the
sky and shouting “Look! Greylag geese”. Those stentorian tones were
put to good use again, after serving with the RNVR and then the
Royal Navy in the Second World War, when he played the role of Sir
Lancelot Spratt, in 1954’s Doctor in the House and its many sequels.
Due to ill health, his film career ended in 1970, but not before
starring in such classics as Scott of the Antarctic, Moby Dick and
The Guns of Naverone.

Justice was an expert falconer and a keen ornithologist. Acting was
a means to an end enabling him to fund his love of wildlife, an
enduring passion. With his best friend Sir Peter Scott, he was one
of the founding members of the Wildfowl Trust. One of their early
successes in conservation was the preservation of the Hawaiian
goose. In 1948, with a team, including Keith Shackleton, they also
helped develop a rocket-propelled device to net wild geese for
marking purposes, developed from an idea used to save the lives of
drowning men. To this day, a portrait of Justice hangs in the home
of Sir Peter’s widow.

To the uninitiated, hunting and conservation would appear strange
bedfellows, but culling as a means to control numbers is a sensible
precaution so that one species does not dominate another. With land
being at a premium on such a small island, hunting is simply a way
of keeping numbers in check. When interviewed, on television in 1966
by Joan Bakewell, that falconry seemed at odds with bird
conservation, Justice replied that “they do it anyway. It’s just
nature under command.”

Being a born raconteur, Justice fathered many stories, so details of
his naval record are sketchy. He appears to have been discharged,
due to ill health, in 1943, spending the rest of the war in and
around the Scottish town of Wigtown, with another lifelong friend,
Keith ‘Toby’ Bromley. A proud Scotsman, he wore the Robertson tartan
with pride, returning to live there many years later, making a home
on the Dornoch Firth, and serving twice as Rector of Edinburgh
University, beating local boy Sean Connery into last place on the
second occasion.

Between 1943 and 1944, he stayed with a Nellie McDowall, whose
cousin remembers Justice staying for about three weeks. After
breakfast, Justice would leave to shoot at the local ducks, doing
the same thing after the evening meal. The garage was used to hang
the dead geese and ducks, gossips suggesting that his methods of
shooting being not entirely legal. Miss McDowall’s cousin, in
hindsight, was surprised that Justice had been a lodger, as his
landlady was a rather prim lady who was very against blood sports!

As a teenager, Sarah Trew recalls Justice lodging with her mother in
Wigtown, as a paying guest, with his friend, Toby Bromley. She
remembers that Justice had a golden cocker spaniel called Sally. On
a cold and frosty New Year’s Day, he was out shooting wild geese,
injuring one bird. Justice swam across the river Cree, to put it out
of its misery.

“Few sports,” wrote Elspeth Huxley in her biography of Sir Peter
Scott, calls “for greater skill, endurance and self-discipline.”
Puntgunning, as its name suggests, involves the use of a punt and a
large calibre shotgun, firing a charge of between eight and twenty
ounces of shot. Justice’s punt gun, Irish Tom, fired a service
charge of fifty ounces. Through this sport, Sir Peter and Justice
first became friends.

Irish Tom was acquired by Justice, after the Second World War, and
used on his many of his trips on the Wash, including those with
another close friend of Justice’s, the Duke of Edinburgh, despite,
apparently, the disapproval of the Queen, because of the danger. The
Wash is one of the few places that active puntgunning still takes
place and it certainly could be a perilous pasttime.

Two officers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were puntgunning on the river Alde in December 1932, when the charge
detonated before the breech was properly shut. Fortunately, a RAF
officer, also wildfowling, nearby came to their assistance. Despite
receiving emergency medical aid, neither the trained nurse on the
scene and later the surgeon could avoid one man losing his leg and
the other a hand.

For many years, Irish Tom was believed to have been lost. However,
it was re-discovered and Justice’s gun now belongs to the British
Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), forming part of a
collection in their main meeting place, the Duke of Westminster
Hall.

Justice’s feature film career came to an end in 1970, appropriately
enough with Doctor in Trouble. Before his death, five years later,
he worked on several natural history films, including The
Puntgunners; in which he appears.